In schools, it is not uncommon for students to either lash out or misbehave, which has led to them getting punished in multiple ways, with one of them being suspensions. Suspensions are to send a misbehaving student home and keep them there for several days. This, in theory, is supposed to have the student reflect on what they have done and strive to never do the thing they have done again. However, even after this, students still keep on misbehaving and causing disturbances, even though they have been suspended many times. We will have to explore suspensions and see how, in theory, these are supposed to help when, in reality, these are just ineffective ways to discipline students.

The first thing we should look at when trying to see if school suspensions are effective or ineffective is how they are presented. While the adults and teachers see this as a punishment for the students, this is a good thing because all they see is that they don’t have to go to school for a few more days, which gives them the incentive to keep misbehaving. What should happen to make it so they see this as a punishment rather than a positive would be to provide them with work at home, and tell them that if they are not willing to do the job, they will be forced to come to school. This way, we can now have students learning that this isn’t just some vacation away from school, but a punishment for lashing out and being bad in school. The work will also be made to fit into what the student is learning, with a mix of all the subjects, for example, if they are having a mix of math, science, and English together. Hence, it fits into their learning rather than just giving them a packet.

The second part of this proves that school suspensions aren’t ineffective is how little they mean. When looking at this from a certain angle, this seems like it is justified, but the problem is how much they give them out, but not really put more pressure on the students to not behave like this. They try to enforce this by stressing the importance of not getting suspensions. However, students aren’t concerned because they only talk about the suspensions, not how they could severely hurt their academic career or future job prospects. The way to counteract this would be to show a person who has gotten many suspensions and has a low income job and bring them up so many students can see so that they can get a picture on what would happen if they weren’t worried about suspensions. If we put these two together, this will make it so that school suspensions can actually work and can make it so that many students renounce their ways of bullying and such.